Exploring inhibitory potential of Curcumin against various cancer targets by in silico virtual screening

Curcumin and its Derivatives Targeting Multiple Signaling Pathways to Elicit Anticancer Activity: A Comprehensive Perspective

The uncontrolled growth and spread of aberrant cells characterize the group of disorders known as cancer. According to GLOBOCAN 2022 analysis of cancer patients in either developed countries or developing countries the main concern cancers are breast cancer, lung cancer, and liver cancer which may rise eventually. Natural substances with dietary origins have gained interest for their low toxicity, anti-inflammatory, and antioxidant effects. The evaluation of dietary natural products as chemopreventive and therapeutic agents, the identification, characterization, and synthesis of their active components, as well as the enhancement of their delivery and bioavailability, have all received significant attention. Thus, the treatment strategy for concerning cancers must be significantly evaluated and may include the use of phytochemicals in daily lifestyle. In the present perspective, we discussed one of the potent phytochemicals, that has been used over the past few decades known as curcumin as a panacea drug of the "Cure-all" therapy concept. In our review firstly we included exhausted data from in vivo and in vitro studies on breast cancer, lung cancer, and liver cancer which act through various cancer-targeting pathways at the molecular level. Now, the second is the active constituent of turmeric known as curcumin and its derivatives are enlisted with their targeted protein in the molecular docking studies, which help the researchers design and synthesize new curcumin derivatives with respective implicated molecular and cellular activity. However, curcumin and its substituted derivatives still need to be investigated with unknown targeting mechanism studies in depth.

Mechanistic Insights and Docking Studies of Phytomolecules as Potential Candidates in the Management of Cancer

BACKGROUND

Cancer is a leading risk of death globally. According to the World Health Organization, it is presently the second most important disease that causes death in both developing and developed countries. Remarkable progress has been made in the war against cancer with the development of numerous novel chemotherapy agents. However, it remains an immense challenge to discover new efficient therapeutic potential candidates to combat cancer.

OBJECTIVES

The majority of the currently used anticancer drugs are of natural origins, such as curcumin, colchicine, vinca alkaloid, paclitaxel, bergenin, taxols, and combretastatin. Concerning this, this review article presents the structure of the most potent molecules along with IC50 values, structure-activity relationships, mechanistic studies, docking studies, in silico studies of phytomolecules, and important key findings on human cancer cell lines.

METHODS

A viewpoint of drug design and development of antiproliferative agents from natural phytomolecules has been established by searching peer-reviewed literature from Google Scholar, PubMed, Scopus, Springer, Science Direct, and Web of Science over the past few years.

RESULTS

Our analysis revealed that this article would assist chemical biologists and medicinal chemists in industry and academia in gaining insights into the anticancer potential of phytomolecules.

CONCLUSION

In vitro and in silico studies present phytomolecules, such as curcumin, colchicine, vinca alkaloids, colchicine, bergenin, combretastatin, and taxol encompassing anticancer agents, offerings abundant sanguinity and capacity in the arena of drug discovery to inspire the investigators towards the continual investigations on these phytomolecules. It is extremely expected that efforts in this track will strengthen and grant some budding cancer therapeutics candidates in the near future.

Target-Based Small Molecule Drug Discovery for Colorectal Cancer: A Review of Molecular Pathways and In Silico Studies

Colorectal cancer is one of the most prevalent cancer types. Although there have been breakthroughs in its treatments, a better understanding of the molecular mechanisms and genetic involvement in colorectal cancer will have a substantial role in producing novel and targeted treatments with better safety profiles. In this review, the main molecular pathways and driver genes that are responsible for initiating and propagating the cascade of signaling molecules reaching carcinoma and the aggressive metastatic stages of colorectal cancer were presented. Protein kinases involved in colorectal cancer, as much as other cancers, have seen much focus and committed efforts due to their crucial role in subsidizing, inhibiting, or changing the disease course. Moreover, notable improvements in colorectal cancer treatments with in silico studies and the enhanced selectivity on specific macromolecular targets were discussed. Besides, the selective multi-target agents have been made easier by employing in silico methods in molecular de novo synthesis or target identification and drug repurposing.

An Integrated Pan-Cancer Analysis and Structure-Based Virtual Screening of GPR15

G protein-coupled receptor 15 (GPR15, also known as BOB) is an extensively studied orphan G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) involving human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection, colonic inflammation, and smoking-related diseases. Recently, GPR15 was deorphanized and its corresponding natural ligand demonstrated an ability to inhibit cancer cell growth. However, no study reported the potential role of GPR15 in a pan-cancer manner. Using large-scale publicly available data from the Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) and the Genotype-Tissue Expression (GTEx) databases, we found that GPR15 expression is significantly lower in colon adenocarcinoma (COAD) and rectal adenocarcinoma (READ) than in normal tissues. Among 33 cancer types, GPR15 expression was significantly positively correlated with the prognoses of COAD, neck squamous carcinoma (HNSC), and lung adenocarcinoma (LUAD) and significantly negatively correlated with stomach adenocarcinoma (STAD). This study also revealed that commonly upregulated gene sets in the high GPR15 expression group (stratified via median) of COAD, HNSC, LUAD, and STAD are enriched in immune systems, indicating that GPR15 might be considered as a potential target for cancer immunotherapy. Furthermore, we modelled the 3D structure of GPR15 and conducted structure-based virtual screening. The top eight hit compounds were screened and then subjected to molecular dynamics (MD) simulation for stability analysis. Our study provides novel insights into the role of GPR15 in a pan-cancer manner and discovered a potential hit compound for GPR15 antagonists.

Structure-Based Drug Design Studies Toward the Discovery of Novel Chalcone Derivatives as Potential Epidermal Growth Factor Receptor (EGFR) Inhibitors

Human Epidermal Growth Factor Receptor-1 (EGFR), a transmembrane tyrosine kinase receptor (RTK), has been associated with several types of cancer, including breast, lung, ovarian, and anal cancers. Thus, the receptor was targeted by a variety of therapeutic approaches for cancer treatments. A series of chalcone derivatives are among the most highly potent and selective inhibitors of EGFR described to date. A series of chalcone derivatives were proposed in this study to investigate the intermolecular interactions in the active site utilizing molecular docking and molecular dynamics simulations. After a careful analysis of docking results, compounds 1a and 1d were chosen for molecular dynamics simulation study. Extensive hydrogen bond analysis throughout 7 ns molecular dynamics simulation revealed the ability of compounds 1a and 1d to retain the essential interactions needed for the inhibition, especially MET 93. Finally, MM-GBSA calculations highlight on the capability of the ligands to bind strongly within the active site with binding energies of −44.04 and −56.6 kcal/mol for compounds 1a and 1d, respectively. Compound 1d showed to have a close binding energy with TAK-285 (−66.17 kcal/mol), which indicates a high chance for compound 1d to exhibit inhibitory activity, thus recommending to synthesis it to test its biological activity. It is anticipated that the findings reported here may provide very useful information for designing effective drugs for the treatment of EGFR-related cancer disease.

Curcumin derivative L6H4 inhibits proliferation and invasion of gastric cancer cell line BGC-823

Curcumin and its chalcone derivatives have well-known, explicit biological antitumor properties, such as instance antiproliferative and apoptotic effects via multiple molecular targets. In this study, we investigated the anticancer activity of curcumin derivative L6H4 (curcumin L6H4) on gastric cancer cells. Inhibitory effects of curcumin L6H4 on gastric cancer cells (BGC-823) were studied by the diphenyltetrazolium (MTT) assay, and cell apoptosis was detected by Annexin-V/propidium iodide (PI) staining and then analyzed by flow cytometry. A mouse xenotransplant gastric tumor model was established to detect the role of curcumin L6H4 in vivo. The apoptosis-related proteins p53, p21, Bax, and Bcl-2 in BGC-823 cells and mouse xenotransplant models treated with curcumin L6H4 were determined by Western blot analysis. Curcumin L6H4 can significantly inhibit the proliferation and induce the apoptosis of BGC-823 cells, thus enhancing the expression levels of p53, p21, Bax, and Bcl-2 noticeably in vivo and in vitro. Meanwhile, curcumin L6H4 can remarkably suppress the growth of tumor cells in animal models. These results suggest that curcumin derivative L6H4 has potent of antitumor properties in vitro or in vivo.

Curcumin and its derivatives inhibit 2,3,7,8,-tetrachloro-dibenzo-p-dioxin-induced expression of drug metabolizing enzymes through aryl hydrocarbon receptor-mediated pathway

Certain dioxins, including 2,3,7,8,-tetrachloro-dibenzo-p-dioxin (TCDD), are exogenous ligands for an aryl hydrocarbon receptor (AhR) and induces various drug-metabolizing enzymes. In this study, we examined the effect of curcumin on expression of drug-metabolizing enzymes through the AhR and NF-E2 related factor 2 (Nrf2) pathways. Curcumin dose-dependently inhibited TCDD-induced expression of phase I enzyme cytochrome P450 1A1 (CYP1A1) and phase II enzymes NAD(P)H:quinone oxidoreductase-1 (NQO1) and heme oxygenase 1 (HO-1) but not tert-butyl hydroquinone-induced NQO1 and HO-1, suggesting that curcumin inhibited only AhR pathway, but not Nrf2 one directly. Furthermore, we used 14 curcumin derivatives and obtained the correlation between hydrophobicity of the compounds and suppressive effect against AhR transformation. Results from the quantitative structure active correlative analysis indicated that methoxy groups and β-diketone structure possessing keto-enol tautomerism in curcumin were necessary to inhibit AhR transformation, and the addition of methyl and methoxy group(s) to the curcumin increased the inhibition effect.

Synergistic anticancer effect of curcumin and chemotherapy regimen FP in human gastric cancer MGC-803 cells

Curcumin is an anticancer compound that exerts anti-proliferative and apoptotic effects via multiple molecular targets. The purpose of the present study was to investigate the anticancer effects of curcumin in combination with 5-fluorouracil plus cisplatin (FP) on the MGC-803 human gastric cancer cell line. Following treatment with curcumin and/or FP for 24, 48 and 72 h, cell viability, cell cycle progression and the apoptosis rate were evaluated using an MTT assay, flow cytometry and dual acridine orange/ethidium bromide staining, respectively. In addition, colony formation, Transwell migration and caspase-3/caspase-8 activity assays were performed. The expression of the apoptosis regulator B-cell lymphoma-2 (Bcl-2) and Bcl-2-associated X protein (Bax) were detected by western blotting analysis. Following treatment with curcumin and/or FP, cell viability, colony formation and cell migration were significantly reduced compared with the untreated control group. The rate of apoptosis, caspase-3/caspase-8 activity and the expression of Bax were significantly increased, whereas Bcl-2 expression was significantly reduced following treatment with curcumin and/or FP, compared with the untreated control group. The efficacy of curcumin combined with low-dose FP was significantly increased, compared with that of curcumin combined with high-dose FP (P<0.05). Therefore, curcumin may enhance the anticancer effects of FP chemotherapy in MGC-803 cells through the promotion of apoptosis via the caspase-3/caspase-8, Bcl-2 and Bax signaling pathways. These results suggest that curcumin may serve as a synergistic drug with chemotherapy regimen FP for the treatment of gastric cancer.

Structural Interactions of Curcumin Biotransformed Molecules with the N-Terminal Residues of Cytotoxic-Associated Gene A Protein Provide Insights into Suppression of Oncogenic Activities

Curcumin as a natural product has drawn considerable attention in recent years for its multiple pharmacological activities against various diseases, but more studies are required to understand the curcumin pharmacological action considering its low bioavailability. Though numerous reasons contribute to the low bioavailability of curcumin, one of the important reasons is associated with biotransformation of curcumin through either conjugation or reduction depending on curcumin administration route. The orally administered curcumin (CUR) is metabolised into curcumin glucuronidase (CUR-GLR) and curcumin sulphate by conjugation, whereas dihydroxycurcumin, tetrahydrocurcumin, and hexahydrocurcumin (HHC) are formed by reduction after intraperitoneal administration of curcumin. The main aim of the current study was to investigate the pharmacological properties of curcumin and its biotransformed molecules and its inhibitory potential against CagA (cytotoxic-associated gene A) oncoprotein of Helicobacter pylori. All lead molecules followed the Lipinski's five rules for biological activities, except CUR-GLR, whereas druglikeness scores were obtained for all molecules. Subsequently, molecular docking was employed to analyse the binding affinity of molecules with CagA. The docking studies revealed that CUR-GLR has highest binding affinity with CagA, whereas less interactive affinity was observed in HHC. From the virtual screening and docking studies, the current study suggests that the biotransformation of curcumin through conjugation has more potential for inhibition of oncogenic activities of CagA+ H. pylori than reduction.

Curcumin inhibits development and cell adhesion in Dictyostelium discoideum: Implications for YakA signaling and GST enzyme function

The molecular basis for nutraceutical properties of the polyphenol curcumin (Curcuma longa, Turmeric) is complex, affecting multiple factors that regulate cell signaling and homeostasis. Here, we report the effect of curcumin on cellular and developmental mechanisms in the eukaryotic model, Dictyostelium discoideum. Dictyostelium proliferation was inhibited in the presence of curcumin, which also suppressed the prestarvation marker, discoidin I, members of the yakA-mediated developmental signaling pathway, and expression of the extracellular matrix/cell adhesion proteins (DdCAD and csA). This resulted in delayed chemotaxis, adhesion, and development of the organism. In contrast to the inhibitory effects on developmental genes, curcumin induced gstA gene expression, overall GST activity, and generated production of reactive oxygen species. These studies expand our knowledge of developmental and biochemical signaling influenced by curcumin, and lends greater consideration of GST enzyme function in eukaryotic cell signaling, development, and differentiation.